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The team is joined by Guest Kats Rosie Burbidge, Stephen Jones, Mathilde Pavis, and Eibhlin Vardy, and by InternKats Verónica Rodríguez Arguijo, Hayleigh Bosher, Tian Lu and Cecilia Sbrolli.

Tuesday, 10 January 2012

The IPKat is pleased to report that his friends at Hart Publishing are starting the new year in a spirit of commendable generosity. This is what they have written to tell him:

"Hart Publishing is delighted to offer IPKat readers a 20% discount on its back list of intellectual property law titles. To claim your 20% discount on any intellectual property law book, be sure to quote reference IPKAT12 when placing your order. If you are ordering online, do please quote the reference in the special instructions field. The discount will not show up on your order confirmation but will be applied when your order is processed. If you have any problems or questions, feel free to email Hart here or you can even use the phone: +44 (0)1865 517530. For the full list of IP titles please click here.

Two recent titles from Hart which are available under this offer are:

Refusals to License Intellectual Property: Testing the Limits of Law and Economics, by Ian Eagles and Louise Longdin (click here for full details)

Says the publisher: "Economic analysis rarely appears on the judicial horizon in intellectual property litigation. In competition cases, by contrast, economists are familiar figures in the courtroom and the language of economics is scattered throughout the judgments of even the highest courts. One might expect, therefore, that refusals to license intellectual property would generate the same fruitful symbiosis between law and economics when those refusals surface in competition proceedings. This however, has not been how the law on this subject has developed in most jurisdictions. Courts and enforcement agencies faced with a unilateral refusal to license have instead tended to retreat into sketchily articulated black letter rules and presumptions which then have to be fenced off from the rest of competition law by economically irrelevant qualifications and distinctions based on private law categorisations of, and rationales for, individual intellectual property rights. This bypassing of case-by-case analysis in favour of more traditional modes of legal reasoning is not entirely the fault of lawyers. Economists have contributed to this state of affairs by urging judges and regulators to convert empirically undernourished theories about the proper role of intellectual property in a market economy into rules of law and evidentiary presumptions intended to be binding in future cases. How this came about and what it means for the future of effective competition enforcement globally are the twin concerns of this book".

Intellectual Property, Competition Law and Economics in Asia, edited by R Ian McEwin click here for further details)

Says the publisher:? "This book results from a conference held in Singapore in September 2009 that brought together distinguished lawyers and economists to examine the differences and similarities in the intersection between intellectual property and competition laws in Asia. The prime focus was how best to balance these laws to improve economic welfare. Countries in Asia have different levels of development and experience with intellectual property and competition laws. Japan has the longest experience and now vigorously enforces both competition and intellectual property laws. Most other countries in Asia have only recently introduced intellectual property laws (due to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement) and competition laws (sometimes due to the World Bank, International Monetary Fund or free trade agreements). It would be naïve to think that laws, even if similar on the surface, have the same goals or can be enforced similarly. Countries have differing degrees of acceptance of these laws, different economic circumstances and differing legal and political institutions. To set the scene, Judge Doug Ginsburg, Greg Sidak, David Teece and Bill Kovacic look at the intersection of intellectual property and competition laws in the United States. Next are country chapters on Asia, each jointly authored by a lawyer and an economist. The country chapters outline the institutional background to the intersection in each country, discuss the policy underpinnings (theoretically as well as describing actual policy initiatives), analyse the case law in the area, and make policy prescriptions".

If you want to join Hart's email list and receive news of books as soon as they are published, you can do so by emailing here or by registering here.

The IPKat feels that, if publishers aren't actually giving their books away free, the next best thing is for them to sell them at a discount, and he's always pleased to hear from publishers who are making special offers for the benefit of his readers.

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